1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to proactively and dynamically providing context sensitive assistance information to a user of a computer system, while maintaining assistance code separate from application code on the computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today, most applications utilizing windows have at least three disparate ways to deliver help: (1) The user can select a help menu item from a window's menu bar; (2) The user can press a help button in a dialog window; and (3) The user can cause hover help to be displayed when a mouse event occurs over a Graphical User Interface (GUI) control, i.e. the user pauses the mouse over a GUI control for a predetermined length of time.
Traditionally, these three help delivery avenues are not interconnected. One path knows nothing about the others. A user is left to his or her own devices to connect the three help delivery avenues into a cohesive "help system." Furthermore, these three avenues pose additional problems that make it more difficult for a user to complete tasks.
First, the help menu leaves a user to wade through different views of the help system. Usually these views or "Help topics" are modeled as "contents,""index" or "find." The contents view, which provides a user with a table of contents, can flood a user with too many choices. This leaves a user with too great an information burden. The index view depends on the help system author to create index entries in exactly the way a user expects the entries to be indexed. Sometimes help topics are indexed in a manner that models the application's design, but not in a way that parallels user tasks. This makes it difficult for the user to find the help topic of interest. Research has shown that the find view, which uses a search engine to find help topics containing a specified string, is often not useful. A user's success with the find view depends upon his or her ability to formulate a search query using terms which exactly match the help topics indexed by the help engine for the search engine.
Second, the help button gives a user specific procedural information about a window, but does not give a user a way to see related information that may be contained in soft copy books. Furthermore, the help button does not provide a direct path to information of different types, such as tips, concepts, and examples.
Third, hover help gives a user a short, plain text description of an object, but does not help the user beyond that. Leaving a user at such an information dead-end, without the ability to see related information or different information types, reduces the usability of applications.
Such prior systems fail to provide standardized context sensitive user assistance which is both dynamic and proactive. This problem is especially significant in Java.TM. applications, where there is not currently a standard for context sensitive help. Such prior systems also rely on hard coded identifiers to call up the various user help views, where the code for user help is integrated with the application code. Furthermore, such systems, in the help context, fail to integrate the concepts of the help menu, help button and hover help.